Saturday, 21 November 2015

Re: Paris, who are the fascists now?

In the end, I want to say that the trouble is neither Islam nor Christianity nor Judaism nor laicism nor atheism, but that all of those groups who in one way or another identify themselves as such or as a belonging to a faith, have their own share of fascists.These will stop at nothing, either in imposing themselves on one another, or on the enemy that is people who wish to have nothing to do with them, but who, on the contrary, wish only to be free of them; nor will they hesitate to collaborate with one another in this objective - to conquer the rest of us.

I recall as short a time ago as 25 years old friends of my parents who were holocaust survivors and exiles from Germany or Eastern Europe from those pre-war years, and also left-leaning Zionists ( I disagreed that this was actually possible, but we could then disagree), and who were also observant Jews, used to say that Begin was a fascist terrorist and Netanyahu even worse; since then, of course things have got properly worse, as we know, with the once calmly religious town of S'fad becoming a world centre of racialised theology. Heaven knows, fom my own work, I know the history of the Bataclan pretty well, and the last four decades of Jewish ownership interest me little as such; after all I have been in a hotel owned by Qatari capital and eaten in places owned by all kinds of people without suffering too much guilt. If, then, the ex owners - they have actually sold it on in the last few weeks, held Zionist fund raisers there, it is not a reason to kill its audience. The ex owner agreed this:

In 2006-2009 at least, Le Bataclan hosted the annual fundraising gala of
the French Jewish Migdal nonprofit group for the Israeli Border Police.
Last month, it hosted a gathering of some 500 Zionist Christians who
came there in support of the Jewish state.

So what was going on? The 'Border Police' actually police an illegal occupation that is officially recognised as such by the UN and the EU, yet disavowed; so what is the charity in this, and for whom must it count as charity? Who are the Christian supporters of Israel if not the VERY far right fundamentalists of the various Christian sects and churches?AND what does it mean that, in the last few weeks, the French Appeal Court, the Cour de Cassation, has rendered the advocacy of BDS, disinvestment and boycott in illegally established (in EU law, that is) West Bank businesses itself illegal? And that it has done this so as to in effect recognise Israel as a Jewish state, which it is not under its UN charter, on the grounds that to advocate BDS is to incite racial hatred and discrimination? I advocate BDS, as it happens, and I don't stop saying this when I go to France.

In effect the court, in implicitly recognising the the "Jewish State' as an 'ethnie' has more or less completed the relation of the Vichy state to the Jews in collaboration with its Nazi allies, but at this time in the interests of a political class in control of Israel, who also want to change the constitutional nature of that state to one of being Jewish.

So who are the fascists now? Well, the killers of the crowds in Paris for certain, though their degree of self hatred is pretty much unexampled for fascists; for though they are fully signed up for 'strength through joy' and train with the same hyper eroticism of becoming-killer as any colonial army (The French in Algeria, the Americans in Iraq), they prefer to die achieving their objectives than to live to enjoy their conquest. But I would rather say they are fascists than Jihadis because that keeps open our political options and allows us to ask who were their victims?

Well not the myth of plural and multicultural Paris. The lives and torment and memories of these victims are being exploited for a racist and political myth, in which the sclerotic and profoundly Zionist laicity of the French state (and some of the international press) and the clerical fascism of Jihad fight it out between themselves. A certain set of 35 - 45 relatively successful urbanites, neither rich nor poor, highly professional in the main, enjoying a life that, politically, is both well meaning and in denial of those who are absent from their happiness, the suburbs, the poor; these wretched individuals are literally shot through in a terrible game in which they had not imagined themselves to be participants.

That is a wake-up call is it not? How do we face those who are the fascists without perpetuating this wretched myth of happiness?

It's truly terrible.

I've been reading les Inrockuptibles since in started out over thirty years ago and I'm 70, and their journalist who died in Bataclan, whose work I have read, was 43, so that gives you a little idea of a time-scale.

None of us are that YOUNG.

Here is a coda, carefully anonymised.

I have a friend who is a close friend of a person who lost someone close in the Charlie Hebdo attack. We had lunch together. This person was in deep grief and mourning, but also supremely angry. Suddenly, after years of silence, distance and neglect, a relative had emerged in another country who announced to the awaiting press that this was bound to happen to the Jews of Paris, it was because of being a Jew. This was hardly the important truth of that person's life and death, but it went down better than the private grief of the nearest loved one. This person was outraged and enraged; the rage had the dignity of a certain truth that is also, right now, dying in the imperialist aftermath of the Parisian horror and its appropriation of the massacre for its own finalities.

When it all unfolded we were at dinner with some friends in the Rue J-P Timbaud, and sirens and the lines of ambulances under the window alerted us to a disaster that could, until that moment, have been on another planet, rather than just around the corner. Three hours before we had walked down the Rue de la Fontaine au Roi; so it goes and so we did not go. I still cannot quite imagine what has happened.

But it's hard to walk on without asking who are the fascists now?andwhat would now be a united front?